Licensing Switches: CockroachDB Becomes Proprietary, Forgejo Now GPLv3+
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The Register UK ☛ CockroachDB scurries off to proprietary software land
Of course, that's not how the company explained its move. It announced it would drop its BSL 1.1 for its free "Core" product in favor of a new Enterprise licensing structure for self-hosted users. This, claimed CockroachDB CEO Spencer Kimball, will provide "all of our users with the full breadth of CockroachDB capabilities." It will also provide "a fair exchange of value." Fair according to whom?
Yeah, yeah, it's for our users, yadda-yadda.
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Forgejo ☛ Forgejo is now copyleft, just like Git — Forgejo
Developers who choose to publish their work under a copyleft license are excluded from participating in software that is published under a permissive license. That is at the opposite of the core values of the Forgejo project and in June 2023 it was decided to also accept copylefted contributions. A year later, in August 2024, the first pull request to take advantage of this opportunity was proposed and merged.
A copyleft license makes reusing other copyleft software easier. Recently, we discovered that some of the dependencies we used were incompatible with the license Forgejo was distributed with, and they had to be removed for now. Choosing copyleft licenses enables us to reuse more work, and saves us precious time to focus on improving Forgejo itself.
Copyleft licenses do not only benefit the developers. They also guarantee freedoms to users of the software. They reduce the risk of exploitive business practices, like creating a modified version of Forgejo with less freedoms to the users, which could ultimately trap users in a vendor lock-in.
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LWN ☛ Forgejo changes license to GPLv3+
Forgejo project has announced that, starting from version 9.0, Forgejo will be released under the GPLv3 license (or a later version). Older versions of the software forge remain MIT-licensed. A copyleft license makes reusing other copyleft software easier. Recently, we discovered that some of the dependencies we used were incompatible with the license Forgejo was distributed with, and they had to be removed for now. Choosing copyleft licenses enables us to reuse more work, and saves us precious time to focus on improving Forgejo itself.